COMP 477: Systems Programming (in Rust)

Course Description

Systems Programming (in Rust) introduces students to the principles and practices of building reliable, efficient, and secure software that operates close to the hardware and operating system. Systems-level code underpins modern computing infrastructure—from operating systems and databases to network services and embedded platforms—and its correctness and performance are critical.

This course emphasizes the importance of memory safety, concurrency, and performance-aware design, and highlights how these features can be used to address long-standing challenges in systems software development. The skills developed in this course are foundational for understanding how software systems work and for building robust, high-performance applications across a wide range of computing domains.

Assignments

Before starting any assignments, please read our guide on effective AI usage to understand how to leverage AI tools appropriately in this course.

Before presenting or reviewing code, please read our guide to conducting a productive code review. These guidelines will become especially important after we complete the first two warm-up assignments.

Course Schedule